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SCRANTON — After 10 years of legal maneuvering and negotiating, Pittston attorney Cynthia L. Pollick settled a Monroe County civil-rights lawsuit for $25,000.

Then came her request for nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in attorney’s fees.

Instead of cashing a check, however, Pollick has found herself facing a $25,000 fine and a disciplinary investigation for submitting a request for fees a federal judge described as “brazen and delusional,” saying it “felt more like an attempted bank robbery than a genuine effort to recover a reasonable fee bill.”

“Ms. Pollick’s fee petition is ‘mind boggling’ and ‘outrageously excessive,’” U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann wrote. “In fact, it is more than that. The vast majority of Ms. Pollick’s entries are larded with excreta unbecoming of any attorney in this district (and certainly unbillable to a client under any stretch of the imagination).”

Pollick did not immediately return a message seeking comment Friday.

At issue is a federal lawsuit Pollick filed against the Pleasant Valley School District and others in May 2007 alleging her clients faced retaliation for engaging in free speech by complaining about a history teacher allegedly exposing teens to “sexually explicit and offensive material.”

According to a memorandum Brann filed this week, Pollick rejected settlements as high as $150,000 before the case was settled against only the teacher, Bruce H. Smith Jr., for a “nuisance value” of $25,000, plus reasonable attorney’s fees.

Pollick then filed a motion saying she had spent 1,400 hours on the case over nine years at a rate of $400 per hour, and that her legal researchers had spent about 567 hours at a rate of $150 per hour. The total cost, she wrote, was $727,402, plus another $5,600 for the 14 hours Pollick spent preparing the motion seeking the fees and costs.

Brann rejected the motion Wednesday, noting that while Pollick “prevailed” on one claim against one defendant, the initial lawsuit targeted teachers, principals and administrators with a “barrage of educational and civil rights claims.”

The judge noted that Pollick’s motion sought fees billed in six-minute increments regardless of how much time the activity, such as reading an email, actually took.

“Ms. Pollick has edged precariously close to the operative ethical boundaries by billing every incoming and outgoing correspondence in separate six-minute entries,” Brann wrote. “Such practice essentially pads her time in 10-minute increments (12 minutes versus two minutes) and reeks both of impropriety and lack of judgment.”

Perhaps the “most repugnant” fact about Pollick’s motion is that she sought to be compensated for time necessitated by her own earlier misconduct — the defendants got a new trial because of Pollick’s “inflammatory conduct in open court,” tainting the jury, Brann wrote.

The judge also noted that this is not Pollick’s “first foray into sanctions hearings over questionable litigation practices and excessive billing in particular.”

In a 2005 case before U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo, the defendants moved for sanctions based on what they described as “totally nonsensical” arguments Pollick put forward.

About five months ago, Caputo “wrote a thorough dissertation on the improprieties of such fee bills in a case litigated by Ms. Pollick herself,” Brann wrote.

“This misconduct and this utter waste of our district’s resources must stop,” Brann wrote. “Fee motions are not meant to spawn parallel litigations, and civil rights cases are not get-rich-quick tickets.”

In addition to leveling a $25,000 fine for violating rules of court, Brann said he intended to submit the matter for review before the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Contact the writer:

570-821-2058, @cvjimhalpin

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